The way we were, through the decades

• Headline on an article on snacks: "Hubby comes waddling home from the office to a wife doing her best to keep him in good health and shape."

•A photo feature on bathrobes: "A robe in which it would be appropriate to wave good-bye to one's husband or greet the milk man."

• A practical story provides detailed suggestions for sending Christmas foods to troops stationed in Vietnam.

• A column by Julia Child runs; first called "The French Chef," it is changed soon to "Voilà."

• Wine column runs weekly from the section's earliest days.

• The first of many annual food-section story staples: What to do with Thanksgiving leftovers.

• The Star's Metro Poll notes that nine out of 10 city shoppers save trading stamps.

• Headline: "Tea parties needn't feature tired menus; try something like apricot ham squares."

• Editor Beverly Kees spends a month eating her way across France and devotes an entire Taste issue to her food experiences.

• A new column, "Value," highlights weekly prices on various supermarket commodities and offers shopping tips. It runs for nearly 20 years.

• Tailgating menu ideas, just in time for the Vikings' season at Metropolitan Stadium.

• A yuletide White House: What the Nixons will eat for Christmas dinner -- and their recipes -- which includes mincemeat pastries, spicy cranberry sauce and blue cheese dressing over fruit cups.

• A column that retrieves recipes from restaurants, at the request of readers, begins with recipes for French Dressing from the Flame Room and Beer-Cheese Soup from the Leamington Hotel's Norse Room.

• Reader Exchange begins, where readers write in asking other readers if they can help with lost recipes. The first recipes are for corn tortillas and baklava.

• An ambitious special section examines the culinary traditions within Minnesota's melting pot and explores foods from 16 ethnic groups.

• Consumers form co-ops for buying organic foods. An official from the Minneapolis district of the Food and Drug Administration reports, "There is no significant or general difference between the residues found in so-called organic foods and other foods. The only difference is the price." North Country Co-op is the first. By 1980, there are 10 in Minneapolis and a dozen in the suburbs.

• Recipe for green bean casserole first appears.

• Supermarket trend: Stores provide expiration dates for their perishable and nonperishable food, thanks to continued efforts of consumer activists and food companies.

• Vegetarian cooking with the seven-member Lincoln Goldman commune in St. Paul, and the Communion Restaurant in Minneapolis.

• "Haute Cuisine" issue includes recipes for canard a l'orange, escargots bourguignon, lobster thermidor, vichyssoise, crêpes Suzette, beef Wellington and Grand Marnier soufflé.

• Both Dayton's (via Supervalu) and Red Owl introduce a shop-by-phone service, a precursor to later grocery delivery services.

• Skylab astronauts dine on lobster, ice cream, veal, pork and scalloped potatoes. Meals cost $25, considerably less than the $50 spent during the Apollo missions.

• The energy crisis yields a story on cooking two meals at once. A reader exchange offers recipes for no-bake cookies, perhaps prompted by the energy crisis.

• First Taste profile of a person of color: Zelia Lockett, a nutrition program assistant with the Agricultural Extension Service of the University of Minnesota.

• The state leads the nation in low-fat milk use. "Increasing numbers of Minnesotans who are turning to low-fat or skim milk may be trimming vitamins from their diets as well as fat from their waistlines, dollars from their grocery budgets and cholesterol from their bloodstreams."

• A much-talked-about recipe for carp wieners is published.

• More energy conservation: "Electric skillets use about one-third as much electricity as an eight-inch electric range element and considerably less than an electric oven."

• Restaurant reviews appear in Taste. The first ones are of the Amalgamated Eating and Drinking Co. Underground in St. Louis Park, the Haberdashery in St. Paul and Charlie's Cafe Exceptionale in Minneapolis.

• Twin Cities Gourmet, a new column that profiles an area cook (and a precursor to the Tastemaker column) debuts, with a look into the kitchen of actress Wendy Lehr.

1976

• How to feed a family of four on $40 per week.

• Profile of Pham Ngoc Huong, one of the thousands of Vietnamese refugees who had recently settled in Minnesota.

• The nation's bicentennial is celebrated with special sections exploring the culinary traditions of the 13 original colonies.

• Bag-your-own grocery shopping comes to the Twin Cities with Red Owl's Country Store chain, which had been preceded by CUB (Consumers United for Buying). CUB shoppers marked prices on products using grease pencils; prices were affixed at the Country Store. "We found it would be more accurate and would save the shopper an average of a half-hour each trip if prices were already on," said a Red Owl spokeswoman.

• Price Check, a column that compares the costs of 25-plus grocery items, debuts.

• Dr. Robert Atkins promotes his low-carb, high-protein diet book, "Dr. Atkins' Superenergy Diet," at Dayton's.

• A first-annual "Dining Out" issue surveys 35 local restaurateurs, who name these as best restaurants: Charlie's Cafe Exceptionale, Chouette, Murray's, the International Rosewood Room and the Lowell Inn.

• The city's trendiest restaurant, according to staff writer (and later editor) Ann Burckhardt, has these attributes: "To qualify, the restaurant must have all of the following: stained glass windows, plants in the windows suspended by macrame, unmatched chairs and lots of bean sprouts. Sgt. Preston's fits the bill but somehow keeps it from being corny."

• Co-founders Pam Sherman and Lynne Alpert are interviewed about their soon-to-open New French Cafe. "We wanted to try something that the Twin Cities didn't have, a real French menu with a long list of hors d'oeuvres and no section of typical American sandwiches," said Alpert.

• A call for story ideas, which becomes an annual effort for almost a decade, results in 125 reader suggestions, including interest in microwave meals.

• A guide to building your own salad bar mirrors the national dining-out craze.

• Restaurant reviews disappear from Taste, not to be seen again in the section for 20 years.

• Taste devotes entire sections to New York City, San Francisco, New Orleans and the regions of China. In 2005, in a similar effort, it collaborates with the Travel section and looks at the same three U.S. cities plus Chicago.

• The shrinking American schedule: A survey shows that median dinner prep time in urban areas is 35 minutes. Seven out of 10 use convenience foods, mostly canned products. Nearly 20 percent said they don't plan ahead, and half said they grab whatever is on the pantry shelf and heat it up. Two-thirds said they never cook for future meals.

• Editor Ann Burckhardt begins a first-person column that runs for more than a decade.

• A forecast predicts that by 2002 personal computers will create meal plans, compose shopping lists and provide nutritional content. Meat will be a luxury, eaten perhaps two to three times per week. Most protein will come from soybeans and legumes.

• Nutritional information is included for the first time with recipes.

• Betty Crocker goes global, with Mexican and Chinese cookbooks, the latter written by local entrepreneur Leeann Chin.

• A story about Dutch food traditions is published in conjunction with the Walker Art Center's "De Stijl" exhibition, an example of Taste's long tradition of focusing on local cultural events.

• Taste gets a new look with the merger of the Minneapolis Star and the Minneapolis Tribune. The Tribune's Food section, which had run on Thursday, begins appearing on Sunday.

• The local croissant craze, first witnessed in 1980, peaks when a croissant dessert hits the menu at Perkins.

• The Practical Gardener, a cook's gardening column, begins.

• Paul Prudhomme is profiled to reflect the popularity of Cajun cooking.

• Irradiation is approved for spices, and the FDA is expected to allow it in more food categories within the next year.

• Co-ops, struggling to survive, become more like supermarkets and stock shelves with spring water, coffee beans, Dannon yogurt and Häagen-Dazs ice cream. The genre hits its peak here with 31 stores in 1982; by 1985 the number is 22. By 2009, there are 12.

• A roster of local farmers markets lists 20. By 2009, there are more than 50.

• With one in five households owning VCRs, Taste examines a newfangled video how-to-cook series.

• New columns include ones on microwave cooking, special diets and quick cooking.

• Before Jesse Ventura hated the media, he shilled for it: A full-page ad in Taste features him wearing a feather boa and commenting on the Star and Tribune classified ads: "They're my kinda reading ... nice, short plots."

• Reagan-era upscale living: Sale of fancy gourmet foods through catalogs is at an all-time high.

• Muffins are hot both for national retail sales and muffin specialty stores.

• Goat cheese replaces brie in popularity.

• Food to Go, a new column that reflects the increasing availability of takeout food, debuts with a quick look at Cecil's Jewish Delicatessen. The column is one of the first nationwide in newspapers to recognize the trend toward takeout. Its presence is an early Taste effort to reach out to noncooks.

• Area food professionals are introduced to readers through two new columns: Meet the Chef and Cooking Teacher's Best. Sunday Food (the former Minneapolis Tribune Food section) is renamed Sunday Taste.

• After 18 years, Taste's poster cover tradition comes to an end because of the decreasing size of the section prompted by a steep decline in supermarket advertising.

• In 1960, Americans consumed 44 million pounds of yogurt, but by 1988 that figure has grown to more than 1 billion pounds.

• Kiwi fruit is a big hit: A Minneapolis wholesaler noted that 25 boxes of kiwi fruit went through his plant every week in the late 1970s. By 1989, 2,000 to 4,000 boxes were the norm.

• The first of a series of seasonal menus begins; it continues today.

• A healthful cooking column debuts.

• Pierre Franey's syndicated 60-Minute Cooking column debuts; it runs for three years.

• Local author Antonio Cecconi writes "Betty Crocker's Italian Cooking."

• Tomatillos, jicama, couscous, cilantro, coconut milk and black beans, considered exotic a decade earlier, have become so mainstream they are found among the recipes entered in the Pillsbury Bake-Off, a contest that has served as a barometer of the country's tastes. Supermarkets become more multicultural, too. In the 1970s, the typical produce aisle contained 65 varieties; today it contains as many as 300, prompted in great part by the influx of Asians and Hispanics, the nation's two fastest-growing ethnic groups.

• St. Paul author Lynne Rossetto Kasper publishes her much-heralded book, "The Splendid Table."

• The sale of bottled water explodes, increasing 500 percent between 1980 and 1990. By 1992, Americans were buying 2.3 billion gallons of bottled water.

• Taste predicts that turkey, exotic beans, biscotti, fancy rice mixtures and gourmet coffee will be the year's hot food items.

• Cookbook reviews appear weekly.

• A list of the winners of food competitions at the Minnesota State Fair starts a tradition that continues today.

• Community Supported Agriculture takes off nationwide. (In a CSA, a farmer trades preseason financial support with shares of the summer's harvest; buyers then receive a weekly share of the farm's produce.) In 1986, only two such farming programs operated in the country. In 2009, there are 42 CSA farms operating near the Twin Cities.

• A redesigned Taste includes a new, easy-to-clip recipe format.

• Desperation Dinners, a syndicated column for the busy soccer-mom set, debuts.

• First annual wine special issue debuts, a tradition that continues today.

• Taste goes online and readers can search through hundreds of recipes, available on the Star Tribune's new website, www.startribune.com/taste.

• The fictitious Betty Crocker gets a new look, painted by John Stuart Ingle, a professor of studio art at the University of Minnesota-Morris.

• According to a Roper Poll, only slightly more than half of all American families eat together five or more days per week.

• Cook's Lesson, a practical cooking guide, debuts.

• First profile of Emeril Lagasse, nascent Food Network star. The fast-growing network boasts 25 million subscribers, twice what it had in 1996. In 2009, the network has 96 million subscribers.

• Chuck Williams, who opened his first Williams-Sonoma store in 1956, visits Williams-Sonoma at the Mall of America. "People are buying more today than they bought before, but they are not cooking the way they used to; they are not cooking three meals a day," Williams said.

• Taste gets a major makeover and aims to reach more noncooks. A note from editor Lee Svitak Dean says, "We may not all cook, but we do all eat. So we've rethought our food coverage to reflect those meals in all their varied forms -- from food-on-the-run and restaurant fare to menus for company and family meals." New columns include those by a local wine writer and a weekly dessert recipe. Restaurant reviews (beyond takeout) are back in the section, and food stories from the news pages are summarized. The section, moved to Thursday from Wednesday, features lots of color photography.

• A report on Somali dining reflects the recent influx of 20,000 immigrants to the Twin Cities.

• The Minnesota State Fair boasts more than 30 foods on a stick.

• With Y2K approaching, sales of French Champagne go through the roof, and consumers store food and water in case of computer glitches predicted for the millennium date change.

• To mark the century's end, Taste looks back at typical foods from each of the past 10 decades, including grasshopper pie (1960s), quiche Lorraine (1970s) and tiramisu (1990s).

• An Online Cook column begins, steering readers to interesting food-related websites.

2001

• Taste visits Texas and looks for the flavors of the Lone Star State as George W. Bush moves into the White House.

• The influx of Hispanics is apparent with five new Mexican bakeries in south Minneapolis alone.

• Made in Minnesota: Taste looks at foods produced in the state.

• Taste travels to Cuba with restaurant critic Jeremy Iggers, who is nominated for a James Beard award for his tale of dining intrigue.

• The state of hunger: With one in 22 Minnesotans receiving assistance from a food shelf, Taste examines a dozen local agencies involved in the fight against hunger.

• Nigella Lawson's syndicated column debuts.

• Taste is named best food section for large-circulation newspapers by the James Beard Foundation.

• A series examines local, sustainable agricultural methods involving meat production: "Clean" pork, free-range chickens and pasture-raised cattle.

• "A Healthier You" series tackles the issue of obesity and its health effects. It's a James Beard award finalist, and wins other awards as a series and for its design.

• Taste gives the Twin Cities restaurant scene two stars, and offers suggestions for improvement.

• The first annual holiday cookie contest appears, a return to the section's reader-submitted-recipes roots.

• Taste bestows its first Restaurateur of the Year Award, to Josh Thoma and Tim McKee of Solera in Minneapolis.

• Taste is named best food section among large-circulation newspapers by the Association of Food Journalists.

• Latest cooking trend for busy parents: Let's Dish, one of several Twin Cities businesses where busy cooks can prepare a week's worth of meals in less than two hours.

• Restaurant critic Rick Nelson starts a weekly podcast, one of the first for the Star Tribune.

2005 • Duluth cookbook author Beatrice Ojakangas is inducted into the James Beard Foundation Cookbook Hall of Fame.

• Cover stories include a guide to shopping organic and a discussion of whole grains.

• Hot: Bottled water, Honeycrisp apple, Spanish cuisine, grilling as technique, convenience and snack foods, gourmet salts, super-small veggies.

• First of annual Taste 50 issues that highlight Minnesota people, products and places.

2007 • No-knead-bread story, prompted by a New York Times story, gets bakers' attention.

• Silver Palate cookbook celebrates its 25th anniversary with a new edition.

• Fall cover shows 50 ways to save on food costs.

• Eating local for a season (the 100-mile diet and beyond) gathers interest.

• Midyear, Thrifty Cook column debuts as economy sours.

• Resurgence of Bundt pan.

• 100-calorie snacks.

• "The Farm Report" blog -- about fresh produce -- runs through summer.

2009 • Covers include: home-style sous vide, Hmong cooking, buying direct from farms, 50 ways to eat green.

• Movie "Julie & Julia" gives attention to Julia Child and her books.

• Flavored liqueurs make the cover, harking back to the '60s.

• Table Talk blog debuts at startribune.taste/tabletalk.